Garrett Mintz and the question that outlasted the meeting

Brad and John had booked an hour. They worked at the same Indianapolis tax-accounting firm, had been friends for three years, and suspected a formal mentoring conversation would be an elaborate way to run out of things to say. Brad had even helped John get the job. Then they opened the agenda. Ninety minutes later, they were still on question one.

Garrett Mintz tells this story about a client because it gets at a peculiar office illusion: familiarity can pass for understanding. You can know somebody’s weekend plans and remain thoroughly uninformed about what they want from work. A small office can contain an astonishing amount of undiscovered territory.

Mintz, the founder and CEO of Ambition In Motion, has made a business of arranging these discoveries. His work began with college students and career questions. It now includes executive peer groups, facilitated mentoring, and software that asks employees and managers to compare their pictures of the same workplace. The recurring question is disarmingly ordinary: how much do you actually know about the person across the table?

The graduates with the impressive jobs

As a sophomore at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, Mintz noticed something uncomfortable about the older friends who had already graduated. Their jobs sounded prestigious. Their pay sounded good. Their descriptions of the working week sounded like people discussing an approaching dental appointment.

They dreaded Monday. They talked about returning to the grind. These were people apparently collecting the prizes a business student was supposed to want. He wondered whether professional success had acquired an unfortunate habit of looking better from the outside.

“Is all of this ‘success’ a façade?” he recalled asking himself. The question was useful precisely because he had not yet committed to the answers. A student could look at an occupation and see a salary, an employer, and a title. The missing information was what living inside that occupation felt like.

He started Ambition In Motion in 2013, initially helping students develop a more realistic understanding of careers through mentorship. It was an appealingly practical response to a large question: arrange a conversation before somebody organizes a life around a job description.

Someone else sees a possibility

Mentorship also had a personal meaning for Mintz. In his own account, an arrest and expulsion during his first year at Indiana University interrupted his education. He credits people who offered guidance and opportunity with helping him reconsider his direction. That experience sits behind his interest in what another person can recognize before you recognize it yourself.

His later path included graduating from Indiana University in 2015. A decade afterward, he returned to that larger story in a conversation with Steve Loflin, founder of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. The organization knew him as one of its own graduates, and the discussion connected his student experience with the company he went on to build.

This gives his professional argument a particular weight. A mentor may help somebody get closer to an existing ambition. A mentor can also help somebody examine the ambition itself. Those are different conversations, and a directory of impressive people does little to ensure either one happens.

Mintz’s business developed around the less glamorous work between an introduction and a useful relationship: choosing the pairing, setting expectations, supplying questions, and checking whether the conversation continues. The invitation is only the beginning.

Take the ladder out of the conversation

In conventional mentoring, the seating arrangement is understood before anyone sits down. One person has experience. The other has questions. There is nothing inherently wrong with either qualification, but the arrangement can leave one participant performing wisdom and the other performing gratitude.

Mintz calls his alternative horizontal mentorship. The essential condition is that both participants remain open to learning from each other, whatever their ages or titles. His corporate programs put that idea into recurring meetings, guided agendas, and facilitated conversations across teams. The format gives people a reason to ask questions that everyday work rarely makes room for.

“You must be open to learning from this person.”

Garrett Mintz, on the starting condition for mentorship

His explanation of the approach is pointed about mutual respect. A relationship becomes fragile if the senior participant treats the meeting as a charitable appearance, with permission to arrive late or speak without listening. A title can get somebody invited into a conversation. It cannot do the listening for them.

Read this way, “horizontal” describes an obligation rather than an organizational chart. The experienced person still has experience. The younger person still has things to learn. Both have to turn up curious. It is a modest requirement with awkward implications for anyone who enjoys being the answer to every question.

A promotion is not everybody’s prize

Another part of Mintz’s thinking concerns work orientation: what people want their work to provide. He uses three familiar categories. A job orientation emphasizes the life work supports. A career orientation emphasizes development and advancement. A calling orientation emphasizes the connection between the work and a personal mission.

In his writing on the subject, he pushes back against the assumption that everyone ought to discover a calling. These orientations can change over a life. He does not present one as a superior personality type. That matters for a founder whose own work has an obvious personal purpose: he leaves room for other people to have different arrangements.

The managerial consequence is concrete. In a public explanation, he describes the mismatch when a career-oriented manager assumes everyone wants the same incentives. A promotion might delight one employee. Another might prefer more autonomy or time outside work. Someone else wants to see the effect of the work on the people it serves.

That is a fairly bracing instruction for a manager accustomed to rewarding people with the next rung of the ladder. Before choosing the prize, ask whether the employee wants to climb.

The room where the boss has peers

Ambition In Motion’s work eventually extended from campus mentoring into executive development. Its mastermind groups offer leaders recurring peer conversations, individual mentor relationships, guest speakers, and in-person symposiums. The company keeps colleagues from the same business out of the same peer group, a practical choice intended to protect openness.

For Mintz, the attraction of these groups is partly the chance to challenge a leader’s interpretation before it becomes everybody else’s working day. A board disagreement, a resistant team, or a difficult conversation with a boss can look different when another executive asks about the missing detail.

His argument about executive learning makes objectivity central. Leaders need people who can question their perceptions. Confidence can help someone make a decision; it can also make the person less interested in hearing why the decision might fail. A peer group gives that tension somewhere to go.

There is a pleasing inconvenience in this model. The boss attends a meeting and does not automatically get the last word. The value depends on what happens after another person says something worth considering.

Put the assumption next to the answer

The software side of the business follows a related instinct. AIM Insights collects monthly employee feedback, tracks goals, and pairs leaders with executive coaching. One feature compares team members’ sentiment with their managers’ perception of it. The gap becomes something the two sides can examine together.

This is where Mintz’s interest in conversation meets the administrative machinery of work. A manager may sincerely believe the team understands a goal. An employee may sincerely believe the goal changes every week. Until those views appear beside each other, sincerity does little to resolve the disagreement.

The product includes goal reports and benchmarking as well as coaching. Its promise is a repeatable process for finding and discussing differences. A survey produces material for a conversation; the coaching is there to help a leader decide what to do with it. The design reflects the same concern that animated the original student mentoring: the outside view can miss the lived experience.

The difficult question survives

Mintz’s recent writing has moved directly into the complications of organizational change. In September 2026, he described a scenario involving an established software business acquiring an AI company. New hires want momentum. Existing employees worry about the risks. The CEO supports change while protecting the business that pays for it.

His diagnosis centers on an unexplained problem. Announcing an acquisition tells people what management has chosen. Explaining the threat to the existing business helps them understand why change is necessary. In the scenario, different groups draw sensible conclusions from different pieces of information. The resulting friction is easy to misread as stubbornness.

His earlier June 2026 essay makes a related point about failed initiatives: agree on the problem, explain the shared consequences, and recognize individual contributions. A solution should remain open to revision. A leader who becomes attached to a particular tool can lose sight of what the tool was supposed to fix.

The company around Mintz has changed since 2013. The question beneath it has proved durable. What does the other person think is happening here? Brad and John needed ninety minutes to begin finding out. A chief executive, with rather more people depending on the answer, might usefully clear the calendar.